


Stench of the West

by almygdala



Category: Original Work
Genre: 212 Words, Animal Death, Flash Fiction, Gothic, Horror, Original Fiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Short, Short Story, Southern Gothic, Western, gentle horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:26:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29074035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almygdala/pseuds/almygdala





	Stench of the West

The plains had always been filled with bones, since you were young. Every week, there’d be new piles, fresh heaps of large animals left to rot in the open air, and you’d sit on the porch on your buffalo skin and watch the sickly vultures pick at their meat. And there was a stench that blew with the wind, wherever you were, that left a vile taste in your mouth and made you dizzy. The smell permeated everything on those plains; digging up the earth gave you the sense that you were digging in a graveyard. That you were trespassing on a resting place. That you were never supposed to be there. And the bones kept piling up, every week a new mound, and the vultures would scratch at the dirt.  


They said the West was ending, when you were young. The stream from the east would be shut off, and it would be settled. It would be a civil place, inbetween barbed wire fences and the scars of railroad tracks, under the hooves of cattle and the farmer’s plow. Everything else would be buried. The buffalo were buried; the bones were buried. But the vultures were always overhead, and the stench of the West hung from their wings, bitter and bloody. 


End file.
